Once you finish exploring, and sit down to relax, it’s time for every Minecraft’s player’s favorite moment. Tappables and Adventures will keep you glued to Minecraft Earth as you walk through your neighborhood, but the game doesn’t end the moment you get home. Everyone in an Adventure with you will be standing next to you, so if you end up feeling overwhelmed, that’s fine. The designers are counting on physical, instead of technical, barriers to keep crowds in check. Most are built with a small number of people in mind. That’s not to say Minecraft Earth’s Adventures are built to work with hundreds or even tens of players. We would have people scattered all over Redmond playing alone.” “We jokingly call it communism,” Olafsson said with a grin on his face, “but we just playtested it, and what we found is when we didn’t have that system, nobody wanted to share. The developers toyed with the idea of a more competitive focus, but that ruined the game’s spirit of cooperation. Once you finish exploring, and sit down to relax, it’s time to build your castle.Įveryone who participates earns the same reward, and there’s no PvP, so the focus is very much on cooperation. Difficulty will vary, with the most difficult adventures holding the best rewards. Another demo focused on spawning fireworks by stepping on a plate, and yet another teased me with a plethora of speeding mine carts that hinted at a puzzle. Victorious, my mind moved to looting, which meant I had to walk across the room and pick up what the skeletons had dropped.Įvery adventure has some obstacle, though I was told not all will be based on combat. Instinctively, I ducked to dodge arrows, then returned fire by tapping on my own bow. One demo plopped me and several other journalists into a dungeon full of skeletons (with little warning, I should add). Your immersion will deepen once you have the chance to play what you see. This is Microsoft flexing its technical know-how on the competition. Minecraft Earth maps the game directly to the real world, in real time, and without forcing you to play within a limited area (like your living room). This is what AR games like Pokémon Go promised but, due to shaky AR quality with the option to turn it off entirely, never really delivered. It’s a bit mind-blowing to come across a classic Minecraft tree and, through your phone, see it blend perfectly into the environment. You can’t pick up a real shovel and start tunneling through your local park to find discover a new dungeon. Jesse Merriam, Minecraft Earth’s Executive Producer told me, “If you want to play Minecraft Earth without augmented reality, you’d have to turn off.”ĪR does have limitations. If you turn around, the Adventure doesn’t come with you. Unlike the Pokémon in Go, these holograms are anchored to the real world and are designed to map directly to it. It might be a patch of pixel-art grass in a field, a blocky tree alongside a sidewalk, or a suspicious arrangement of stone in a park. Approach an Adventure and you’ll see an impressive, but innocuous, hologram appear on your phone as you view the world through your phone’s camera. That’s when your expectations will be shattered.Īdventures are a holographic mini-game projected onto the real world, using your phone as a window. Eventually, though, you’ll run across an Adventure. I imagine at least half your time playing Minecraft Earth will involve wandering around your neighborhood and tapping nearby resources or chests for loot. You approach, you tap, and you get a reward. They work much like the PokeStops and Gyms scattered throughout Go. The map’s numerous icons, most of which are ‘tappables’ – chests or resource nodes that you can tap for a reward once you’re within 70 meters – only deepen comparisons. That familiarity is sure to make some players worry Microsoft is looking to cash in on interest for the mobile AR genre. The blocky style of Minecraft is applied, of course, but doesn’t do enough to make the game stand out at a glance. Its expanse of emerald green grass broken up by the grid of real-world streets immediately brings Pokémon Go to mind. Your heart may sink the first time you see Minecraft Earth’s world map. It’s called Minecraft Earth, and it’s the first true augmented reality game you’ll care about. The Minecraft team has a plan to blur the lines between everyday reality and the game’s blocky world. between ages 9 and 11 play Minecraft.Īnd that’s just the beginning. Microsoft says about half of all children in the U.S. The game remains a mainstay among young gamers to this day. Minecraft proved that early access is a completely viable way to develop a game while simultaneously popularizing a new genre of creative, systems-based sandbox titles that let players make their own fun. First released ten years ago today (although it remained in beta until late 2011), the game rose to success through word of mouth.
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